To Catch the Wind

A hand on the helm and your eye on the horizon: Maui sailors extol the cruising life.

 

Sky Barnhart

 

Photography by Jason Moore

I learned a new word today. Cruiser. Not the car you can buy for 500 bucks and drive around the island twice before it conks out. This kind of cruiser is a person—someone who’s living out the fantasy of everyone who’s ever felt the wind through the sails of a sailboat.

Cruisers live aboard their sailboats and sail around the world (or at least island-hop). They eat, sleep and work onboard their boats, visiting new ports of call like the sailors of old—but with a little more technology and some pretty good maps.

Kula residents LuAnne and Rob Yapp are cruisers. In May, they sailed the Compass Rose, their forty-two-foot Hunter 420 sailboat, from Florida to the Virgin Islands. They left the boat in Saint Thomas to come home to Maui for the birth of a grandchild, then returned in August to sail to the Windward and Leeward Islands in the Caribbean. Their goal: to make it to Aruba or Bonaire by December, then home to Maui . . . then maybe  to Tahiti.